A Stranger's Grave Read online

There’s a grave in a cemetery in a small Norfolk market town.

  County regulations state that a grave must be four feet and six inches deep for a single burial and six feet and six inches deep for a double grave.

  In 2011 a man named Franklin Sampson dug a grave to a depth of four feet and six inches deep in which the remains of a boy named John Upbright were laid.

  Sampson removed the turf with a spade in shallow, long strips, like he had done many times before. He laid these to one side. Next to these he shovelled a mound of dirt in a pile on a waterproof sheet which was later covered with fake grass, sheet and dirt both.

  The bereaved do not need to know the mechanics of death.

  The funeral was attended by none of John Upbright’s friends but all of his family. His mother remarked that the service had been beautiful.

  Sampson returned after dark and worked by the light of a Coleman lantern to return the earth to the grave. He filled two wheelbarrows, piled high, with displaced dirt. Walked on the dirt with small shuffling steps. Then the turf, which he walked over again. Making sure no one saw he then urinated on the grave of the neo-Nazi.

  A little girl watched from behind a bush, like she was playing hide and seek.

  She was. But not from him.

  *

  27.

  Elton Burlock stood next to Franklin Sampson at a respectful distance from the funeral of John Upbright. Neither man went inside the chapel for the ceremony.

  The funeral was a quiet affair, respectful of both the newly dead and the old. The funeral director walked at the head of the procession, cane in hand, to the door, where he greeted the vicar and removed his top hat. Everything was solemn, every performance polished. Elton had been to enough funerals in the past to know how it worked. It was a performance, a job. He never did know if the funeral director really cared, or if it was just artifice, like a road traffic accident victim arranged peacefully in an open casket by a mortician who perhaps listened to heavy metal while working.

  He didn’t suppose it mattered, either way, if it gave the bereaved comfort. Thoughtful touches made it worthwhile. Like being asked if you wanted your wife buried with her jewellery. What he wanted her to wear. Like the question spilling from the funeral director’s mouth while Elton was held in custody, 'What Francis should wear?'

  What should she wear, wondered Elton at the time, for the rest of eternity after her short and beautiful life?

  Things like that stopped you from lashing out at the funeral director, even when he was talking to you in the visitor’s room in a category A prison that he’d travelled to especially to show some respect.

  Little things that made the funeral easier, kind of like valium.

  So Elton stood a way back.

  Franklin Sampson stood a way back, too, like he was expected to, not because he cared about the boy being buried.

  Three weeks late, too, the funeral. After the investigation had gone cold, the body had finally been released. Funerals move fast, relatively speaking. Probably because the quicker you can get a body in the ground, or burned up, the quicker the living could get on with the serious business of grief. Usually, if there are no complications, no autopsy to perform, a body’s in the ground after a week or so, two weeks, maximum. Enough time for those involved to make the arrangements they need to, for distant relatives to attend...not long enough to make people itchy to get the dead in the ground. Not long enough for people to worry about the dead going off.

  Elton remembered attending his grandmother’s funeral, open casket, when he was a younger man. Early on, while she was in the chapel of rest, she’d looked at peace. He came back again, the following day, and she’d looked slack, like the last vestiges of life had, at last, fled. One day she was his grandmother, the next just a simple empty corpse.

  So Elton watched with respect, Franklin watched with boredom, but they were both present, in case they should be needed. It was expected, but Elton would have done it anyway, because he expected it of himself.

  When the mourners all left in a procession of mismatched cars, Elton turned to Franklin.

  ‘Want some help filling it in?’

  ‘I’ve got it,’ said Franklin. He nodded at Elton. ‘Hope the job goes well.’

  ‘Did you know the last guy?’ Elton asked.

  ‘Not well,’ said Franklin.

  For Elton and Franklin that was pretty much it, as far as John Upbright was concerned. Elton would give him a little thought, from time to time. Some questions came up again, later, but nothing that would trouble him, not really.

  People are born, they die. They think maybe they make a difference. Young people don’t think about it so much. Men Elton’s age, Franklin’s age, they can’t help but think about death and what they leave behind.

  Some men and women left a legacy. They were remembered through the ages. They had monuments built for them. People dug them up, placed them in a museum. Some people left artistic works, or literary genius that lived on, or philosophical thought. Plato, Debussy, Elvis Presley, Nefertiti, Jesus, Eric the Red, Al Saladin, Dickens. They left a history, a mark.

  Elton knew he wouldn’t leave a damn thing. No legacy, no family, no one left to mourn him when he was gone.

  He spared a thought for John Upbright because he could imagine himself in that grave, unmourned, unloved, forgotten. What would John Upbright leave behind? The same as Elton. A trail of forgotten paper and an entry in the registry of death and murder.

  He was glad the family turned out in numbers. The boy might have been some wannabe Nazi, but someone had loved him well enough, once.

  Maybe that was enough.

  *

  28.

  DI Francis and DI Terry attended the funeral, watching to see if anyone looked shifty. DI Fredrickson fucked his mistress, then went home early for his wife’s birthday and took photographs of his daughter at a birthday party.

  PC’s James and Davis watched snooker in their favourite pub in town.

  The funeral procession left the church at a snail’s pace, and the investigation moved no faster.

  Sometimes people die. Sometimes people are murdered. More murders, more disappearances, more mysteries, go unsolved. In that ledger, there are a million entries with no neat ending, no conclusion.

  The mourners would never have the satisfaction, the closure that comes with the knowledge of reasons. The police would never be able to shut that ledger with finality.

  It would fall to Elton, and Elton alone.

  But Elton was a man with broad shoulders and a wide jaw. Sometimes it takes a killer to understand the mechanics of death and the ghosts that haunt the living.

  *

  29.

  At ten o’clock in the evening Franklin zipped up his trousers while straddling John Upbright’s grave.

  A little girl, bald on one side where her head was horribly deformed, watched. She had the most beautiful eye, but just one. That eye was a stunning blue that glowed bright like a spring moon even in the dark. One tooth, her only tooth, grew from the roof of her mouth. Her left arm was a stump that ended in a small hand, far smaller than her right.

  She was perhaps three, perhaps four. She could speak, but her speech was the stunted, sometimes garbled speech of a toddler. Perhaps younger, undeveloped speech even, like a child of two or so, if the child was an early learner.

  She wore an old fashioned dress and long socks and sensible black shoes, like a child might have worn just after World War II, or maybe a little before, like a child that maybe hadn’t made it as far as D-Day, or VE day, or rationing, or the sixties and a resurgence of hope.

  The little girl never knew hope, but she knew peace until the day she died.

  She’d always been a happy child.

  There was peace on her face, a kind of idiot happiness, as she watched the old grave digger fart over the grave for good measure.

  Then the serenity on her face fled. Startled, she ran silently across the cemetery, lost from sight quickly as sh
e left the circle of light made by the Coleman lantern on the ground beside the grave.

  *

  30.

  Laughter came from the east. Franklin zipped himself up and swore.

  ‘Fucking kids,’ he said, farting for good measure.

  The man Burlock seemed like he had enough about him to do his job, which meant he’d have locked the east gate with nightfall. The gates were always shut by nightfall. Police were supposed to patrol at night from time to time, but the gates were locked and he’d never seen a copper in the cemetery the whole time he’d worked there.

  He’d seen some weird shit while he was working at night but it never did bother him. It seemed right, somehow. Digging was night work. It was dark business and that was the way it should be.

  But then the cemetery was for the dead, restless or restful. Not for laughing kids breaking in after dark, when the gates were locked. Some little bastards had jumped the fence to get in.

  Word was it was the Upbright boy who’d been spraying graves. The gravedigger figured the little shit deserved what he’d got. Some people had no respect for the dead. Spraying little kids’ graves...that was something, alright, and a long way for right. Sure, thought Sampson, Upbright deserved what he got.

  He’d bet his arse these bastards were his friends. Too piss scared to have anything to do with the funeral, in case they got fingered. He’d seen the coppers lurking at the edge of the cemetery during the funeral, checking it out.

  The bastard’s mates probably had enough wit to stay away from the funeral but not enough to stay away from the grave.

  ‘Give them a piece of my mind,’ he said, taking his shovel and his lantern with him.

  Shovel in hand and light held before him he went toward the voices and he was angry, because they were laughing, and he had a shovel in his hand he was kind of thinking of using.

  They shouldn’t be laughing, especially not after dark.

  The cemetery must be pretty busy, he figured, because an instant later the laughter turned to a scream, one single high pitched squeal, like someone just had a bitch of a shock.

  The cemetery was always busy at night. He’d seen more than a few restless dead roaming in his time. He wasn’t easily scared. You couldn’t be, not being a proper gravedigger, working by the light of a lantern, digging out the old way, by hand. This scream, though...this sounded like someone had just had the shit scared right out of them.

  You could tell a ghost by the way they felt, even if they did look solid. Made him jump a fair few times, over the years. But he wasn’t squeamish.

  But then the scream didn’t sound like shock anymore. Sounded like terror. Sounded like blue murder.

  Something about that scream turned him right around.

  It wasn’t a scream that said come this way. It was a scream that said go the other way, and don’t stop. Don’t you dare stop.

  *

  31.

  Tania Reed and David - Sutherland, like the actor, the cool one out of 24, not the old fuck - jumped the fence to the cemetery with a four pack of Stella in each hand. The Stella was more hopeful than essential. He figured if he could get Tania drunk enough she might suck his cock, maybe let him fuck her. Just a vague hope, though, that teenagers entertain.

  Tania was sad, partly, because roughly half an hour, maybe an hour, after sleeping with John, someone had killed him. But she was horny, too, because Dave had just touched her arse, and she was a good way drunk, and for some reason the cemetery turned her on. She didn’t know the why of it, but she’d lost her virginity in the cemetery when she was thirteen years old, and it had done it for her ever since.

  ‘Come on. Let’s go and see.’

  ‘I heard he was fucking eviscerated,’ Dave said.

  Tania laughed. ‘Eviscerated.’

  ‘Eviscerated,’ said Dave again, squeezing Tania’s left tit suddenly. Tania bit her lip, then she laughed again, unsteadily, but sort of enjoying it. Her nipples, firm in the brisk midnight air, puckered and tingled.

  She had a dragon tattoo on her arse. She thought about maybe showing it to Dave. He had a tattoo on his belly, just above his pubic hair. She’d never seen it, but Kate from over the other side of the playing field, the wrong side, who rumour had it had fucked an Alsatian in front of a couple of boys in the year eleven of school, told her it said ‘Unzip here’, which she thought was pretty fucking stupid. But right now she was thinking it might be nice to see it, see if it was true.

  ‘That’s the new part,’ she said. ‘Over there. You want to see where it happened?’

  ‘Is it true?’ said Dave.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did you...ah...you know? Before he died?’ Suddenly he seemed bashful. She liked that, too.

  ‘You want to see where we did it?’

  She could tell he had a boner, because he shifted his leg around and stuck his hand in his pocket to hold it over to one side. She liked the gesture.

  She took his hand.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, and thought she might get to see his tattoo, maybe, and that she really would like to see it.

  Then a woman stepped out on the path before them and Tania screamed, because she was the woman dressed in black.

  It was the hag, and she stank. She was terrified, because as soon as she saw the old bitch, she knew death was coming for someone. It didn’t take any great intuition. It was the smell in the air, and some primal part of her recognised it straight away.

  *

  32.

  Elton wasn’t asleep this time around. He heard the scream and put down the rag he was using to wash the floor, his last job before bed.

  Soon after, as he was putting on his shoes to go and take a look, he heard footsteps rushing by his front door. He yanked the door open, hit by the sudden cold, and rushed outside, just in time to see Franklin Sampson yank the gate open and run off down the hill, his dirt-shod boots clomping and leaving a muddy trail of footprints behind.

  Elton thought Franklin Sampson was way too old to be running like that.

  Elton thought, too, that if the old guy didn’t slow down, he’d have to figure out how to dig a grave himself.

  But then the scream came again, and he was running himself, because this time it really did sound like someone was being murdered, and he didn’t want a second one on his watch.

  One death, nothing to link him, he’d sailed through, if you could call twenty-four hours in a police cell sailing. With two deaths in the cemetery the police were going to start looking at him a little harder. Asking a few tough questions. It wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle, but he didn’t want to spend another day inside.

  Elton had no doubt someone was in mortal fear, or even dying. He’d heard screams of people dying before. But he’d heard that scream, that same tone and tenor, twice before in a Category A prison that had once been his home, and he didn’t ever want to go back. He had a new home now. He liked his job and he liked his cottage.

  Three weeks had passed and he had the cottage pretty much straight. The cemetery hedges, hawthorn, ivy, even young oaks just coming through, he’d been round and trimmed it all. In a way, he’d worked harder than he had to. Perhaps he felt the cemetery should look nice for the boy’s family. He knew how it felt, losing a kid.

  There wasn’t anything more to it than that. He’d worked hard to keep this job, not to give anyone a reason to think that maybe hiring a murderer wasn’t such a good idea.

  He liked working outside, after so long hardly seeing the sun. He liked the sun on his face. He liked knowing where the sun was, even on a cloudy day. It was just clouds. It wasn’t concrete.

  Twenty-six years in jail? He couldn’t face another one, another day. Not now he was settled.

  Someone was dying, while he ran and his knee cried out at him, and he was cold inside, thinking about his cottage and his job, putting one foot in front of the other.

  But then he’d died inside a long time ago, and the cold was the only thing that kept him fro
m laying down and dying.

  *

  33.

  PC James and PC Davis were in the shit. They knew it. That was why they were standing in the shadows of the new section of the cemetery, watching, when Franklin Sampson pissed on John Upbright’s grave.

  James passed Davis a cup that was really the lid of a thermos, and the thermos his wife had filled with hot sweet tea for him. Davis spilled some over his hand.

  ‘Shit,’ he said, but quietly. The gravedigger didn’t hear.

  DS Fredrickson gave them this crappy detail, but what could they do? They’d been plodding up the hill when they were supposed to be at a murder scene. They’d been on shitty jobs, endless shitty jobs, for the last three weeks. Most of those had involved staking out the cemetery.

  ‘Be quiet, for God’s sake.’

  Now they were here to see if anyone was stupid enough to visit the grave. They knew two of the kids the Upbright boy had hung around with. Easy enough to figure on the girl being the one who’d been having sex with the boy, but they’d grilled her plenty and she hadn’t seen a thing. Her parents gave her an alibi – she’d been home by twenty to four, and the boy had died messy. Her parents swore she wore the same clothes she went out in.

  Plenty of questions for her, but no answers.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Davis. He slurped some tea, making a noise like a camel giving a blowjob.

  Cold water dripped from the tall bushes – laurel – down the back of PC James’ civvies. He shivered and nearly cried out as it traced ice down his neck.

  It was fucking spooky enough in the cemetery at night without shit falling down his collar.

  PC James pulled his collar higher, watching the old grave digger and thinking about the case. He knew the girl hadn’t done it. He’d seen it in her eyes. Davis wasn’t so sure, but James didn’t let that worry him.